Anatomy and Art

Lately I’ve been working on another painting.  You might say I’ve been a little obsessed.  She’s not quite there yet, but I wanted to share a few shots of my process so far…

It’s still got a little ways to go, but I’m excited about her.

They say that home is where the heart is, and I’ve finally completed the first painting here at the new house.  I guess this must be home.  This was a fun one to make.  I usually only do figures and faces in this kind of style, but I’ve been meaning to play with a little of what I learned about the body’s internals on canvas for a while now.  It was a good refresher too.  I so rarely look at organs anymore.  Most of the biology I see these days is at the molecular level.  So this was fun.

Just a nice little math visualization that I made in Cinema4D and recently posted to YouTube

I started to post something tonight, but had a moment of doubt about my terminology.  So instead, I’m now deleting that and taking a personal moment to show off my awesome new dog named Rocky.

He’s a shelter rescue mutt, part welsh corgi and part pit bull they say.  If you’ve ever doubted the significance of genetics, just look at dogs.  They come in such a variety of sizes and shapes, and good portion of those moves have been intentional on the part of humans.  It’s a weird deal.  But I sure am glad to meet this guy.

Last Thursday I attended a live drawing session.  For as much time as I’ve spent focused on the human form in art, I really haven’t had a lot of practice doing this.   It’s a really good exercise.  And maybe if I spend a little more time working at it, I’ll get better at it.  This one was my charcoal sketch, which was fun to play with and I think looked better than my pencil sketches, but I think that I may have gotten more out of my pencil sketches as an exercise.  Next time, I’m thinking of taking my Super Sculpey in and seeing how far I can get with a sculpture during the longer poses.  Having a live model there, affords the opportunity to even get up and walk around a bit, so it’s kind of perfect for that.  Then again, there’s a reason that this is such a time honored tradition, and maybe I should give myself a little more time working in pencil or getting more familiar with charcoal before I go and change the dynamic to 3D.

However I wind up working next time, I’m really happy to have found this place.  My coworker, Alex, told me about it.  With all our work being so digital day in and day out, it seems especially nice that she and I were able to steal away a few hours to sit and work from a model in traditional physical mediums.  No pixels, no lines of code, no software glitches, just making marks on paper.

Tonight I carved a jack-o-lantern for the first time in years.  He’s just a little guy, but he’s perfect for my little porch in front of my little house.  This is a good tradition we have here.

I am finally starting to settle into the new studio space at my new place.  Been playing around a little bit lately with hands.  Nothing is finished yet, but I thought I’d go ahead and share the work in progress so far.  I think it’s coming along.

Hello again readers!  I’m so happy to be able to finally share with you all an animation that I worked on some months back for Sapling Learning.  Some of you will recall me writing about this one before.

The 3D models were created by studying the molecular sizes and shapes of the relevant molecules and then creating simplified representations. The 3D animation itself was created using Maxon’s Cinema 4D. Then the individual shots were composited together in Adobe’s After Effects. Audacity was used to record the narration, and then it was all put together for timing in Final Cut Pro (I still use an older version and cannot speak to all the changes they made in X.) I went back into After Effects for further labeling and effects (like the zoom into DNA polymerase) after that. So that’s the basic work flow.

There are a lot of biochemical processes that feel like a very complicated ballet as you get further into them.  Putting together the action of everything happening at the same time for the final shot in this animation really got me thinking about that analogy again.  And the truth is, that when this actually happens in nature, that lagging strand is actually being whipped around by helicase and read in an even more complicated fashion.  I really like that we emphasized that we were simplifying for clarity with this one.  A lot of educational materials would just let students find that out later if they went on to the next step in their studies.  That kind of thing always bothered me when I learned about such processes in school, and I’m happy to be with content experts who are willing to take the time to either make something more accurate, or let students know when things are being brushed over or left out of the picture for clarity.  I think that kind of thing is important.

Anyway, I’m really happy to be able to share this with you all.

Introducing a new painting!  This one was one of those that took a really long time to make.  I actually found this photo with a digital date stamp reaching back to August of 2011.  So, I’m thinking that must be the summer when I started it.

Sometimes you get stuck in the making.

The last couple weeks I’ve been driven to get back into it though.  My hands have been in poor shape this last month, so I feel lucky to have been physically able to tackle this one again when I needed to.

About a week and a half or so ago I had it this far…

Honestly, the gradient on the wall interrupted by the door was surprisingly technically challenging.  In the beginning I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with that wall, but when I finally had that decided, and then finally managed to get it right, the rest of it was on.

There may be more layers of paint on this one than anything I’ve ever painted before.  But I like where it’s landed.

Last week I made another tree painting.

I took a few cell phone shots along the way again.

I kept adding branches, and refining, until eventually I got this.